


here we are again, at the corner of where we met

by midwintersilver



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, these two have pined so much they have me pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 17:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22347043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midwintersilver/pseuds/midwintersilver
Summary: scott has made plans for his future.tessa has made her bed.countless times she's shut down The Conversation in fear of that knife-edge they're skating on.but looking at losing him has a habit of clearing her vision.
Relationships: Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue
Comments: 6
Kudos: 63





	here we are again, at the corner of where we met

You should know that these two drive me _absolutely crazy._

* * *

~ It’s awfully easy to pretend to be in love with someone when you are in love with them. ~

Scott had said something similar to her once - back in the grueling hours of strength training before Sochi. _It’s never been hard for me,_ he’d said. _Looking at you - I know it. I feel it.  
  
_She’d agreed, in a sense, gritting her teeth imperceptibly through the pain of it. _We’re so good at the show, hey? It’s so natural after all this time.  
  
_There was hurt like a firestorm in his eyes. His head dropped, hair flopping over his face in a way that would be funny in other circumstances. _That’s not what I meant, Tess._

She sent up a silent prayer. _That’s not what I meant, either,_ she whispered to something bigger as she watched him up his weights in barely-veiled pain. _But I’ll say what I need to say to keep this together._

* * *

Tessa was surrounded by people. It was the holidays, and she’d gone to London, Ontario to be with her family. All was well. They’d won in PyeongChang, a wonderful Winter Olympics to cap off their picture-perfect comeback. Scott had pulled her into him afterwards, harder than ever before, and she’d wanted to stay there forever. She didn’t have words for that elation - it was like sunshine reflecting off ice, so bright that your eyes hurt and your stomach hurt and there was nothing left to feel anymore.   
  
Scott was there in her shining minute - in every shining minute she’d had for as long as she could remember. Maybe, more correctly, every one of her shining minutes was his as well. At her college graduation, he’d stood a step back from her parents, ever the well-raised boy. But as she walked up in her mortarboard, sweating from the long grad robe, she’d scanned until she found his eyes. They were more important by far than the scroll the dean was placing in her hands. She felt the cool paper, and she was proud, but somehow Scott’s pride was what she sought. Make no mistake, she knew how to exist without Scott. She just didn’t want to.   
  
And now, looking through the window to the pitch-black garden as she bit into perfect garden salad, tomatoes and goat’s cheese and lashings of balsamic dressing, it was Scott she thought of. He was with his family as well - visiting Ilderton, just 20 minutes drive away. Probably Jackie too. They hadn’t been dating very long but they’d got serious very quickly - it felt like Scott was sick of waiting for the perfect person. People had said to her - more than once, suggestively - that perhaps he’d felt that biological clock ticking and didn’t she feel hers too?   
  
She did. Of course she did. And she heard that tick no more strongly than when Scott had told her he was planning to propose.  
  
In a way, it made sense that he told her first. They had been each other’s #1 person for a very long time. At first, it was by necessity more than anything else. When you were training as hard as they were, you saw precious little of the non-skaters in your life, no matter how dear they might be. And there was a big difference between the acquaintances you met on the rink or in the gym - the ones who would give you a bright smile and a ‘hi’ through their own pain, but not let you any deeper - and the partner who could not avoid seeing - feeling - every drop of sweat you shed. Scott had lattices scarred on his thighs where her skates had hit him at just the wrong angle. She had half-moon marks on her waist from a lift where he nearly dropped her, a dent in her forehead from hitting his knee. There’s a kinship you feel when your scars match up, when you’ve been through the peaks and the troughs together in an impossibly tiny boat.   
  
But that was all about to end. He’d told her he wanted to propose, and then that he thought it was time to retire. He hadn’t been nearly as excited as she’d expected. There was almost a plea in his eyes to talk him out of it, like she’d talked him out of jumping off a wall while drunk in Sochi, his eyes screaming _first runner up is just the best loser.  
  
_But Scott’s heart was one of the best things about him, and she would never try to talk him out of using it. No matter that something closed up deep within her chest at the thought of him getting engaged. No matter that she could barely fight back the tears at not having him on the ice, or off it. She’d known the price she had to pay, every time she stemmed his heart with _business partners,_ watched the way he looked at her and told herself that he was just acting, that both of them were.   
  
But as the reality tracked through her head - Scott was getting married, he might be moving away, she was going to not have him anymore - she felt her heart expand so much she could barely breathe, and she couldn’t talk herself down. Scott’s heart might be one of the best things about him, but it was one of the best things in her life as well. He matched her logic with fire, kept her going when she wanted to stop. He was the reason she put in the extra hour in the gym - because his pride was her pride, and there’s nowhere she wouldn’t go for him. He inspired her daily with his strength and dedication, with the warmth he showed to fans and his family and every ordinary person he met. He made her more human in ways she never thought she needed, never noticed him doing because he was always there. And when he looked at her and said _you know, I’d never let you fall,_ she believed him. He had never once told her that she shouldn’t pursue something, even when she was telling herself to pull back, to give up, to stop hoping. He made space in his heart for hers, and she didn’t know what to do with it all in her chest. She’d thought she could be okay with this. But here, in the middle of her family home, was apparently where she realised she couldn’t live without Scott. 

As soon as dinner was over, she’d be gone.

* * *

She knocked. Once. Pause. Twice. Pause. Three times. Their pattern. Had she meant to identify herself? It didn’t matter, it was habit. The run up from her car hit her and she doubled over, gasping. She almost bowled forward when Scott opened the door, and she watched him catch her on reflex as if from above.   
  
“Tess,” he said slowly, and then a hand came to her cheekbone. “Tessa. What’s wrong?”  
  
“I…” she pushed the points of her nails into her palms to ground herself. “A bit.”   
  
“Come in.” He was the face of concern, tousled hair and grey sweatpants. He looked _beautiful._ She allowed herself to live in that feeling for a second before she followed him inside.   
  
“Tess, you’re going to talk to me, right?” She watched his hands shake in the familiar way that meant he was worried - about comps, about work, about _her._ He’d seen himself as her protector before she knew better than to need one. She’d seen him, one day at age 10, having a terribly serious conversation with his mum about how girls had cooties but if he got them looking after Tessa, that would be okay. The look on his face said that he thought cooties would result in something instant and incurable. His mum did nothing but humour that childhood earnestness - it was good for Scott, her haphazard firecracker, to have something to stay solid for.   
  
_And it was good for Tessa to have his fire to borrow.  
  
_“Yes.” Her voice was suddenly gravelly. “I was home.”   
  
“I know.” Something flicked between their eyes, sizzled, faded into dusk. “Why did you come here?” 

It felt like something was pressing on her stomach. The words were there, but they were choked down like a fire under a blanket. She wanted nothing more than to say them, but _lord, she’d lied._

“You lied?” 

“Did I say that out loud?” Her hand went up to touch her mouth. She felt something like wonder that it had betrayed her so utterly. 

“Tess, you gotta tell me. There’s plenty I can do to help, and you know I’d go anywhere for you.” He sat down on the sofa and patted the seat beside him. 

As she had so many times before, she followed the trail he blazed. He was so often the one to spearhead their life changes - changes in artistic direction, in gym routines, in takeaway. There was something especially fearless about him when she was around, like he knew that she’d hold him back from anything truly stupid and let him free with the rest. 

She’d follow him anywhere. She followed him now. 

“I...I know that you’ve had feelings for me.” 

She watched him weigh up the options. He had professed a desire to get engaged. You shouldn’t do that if you had feelings for your partner-slash-best-friend fairly recently, and especially if those feelings persisted. In a moment of terror, she wondered if she’d misread everything, every moment she’d stopped them having That Conversation, and he’d never felt for her at all. 

“Yes.” He had taken the middle option. There was very little give in his voice. 

"Do you...did you...have you thought I returned them?” 

“Tessa,” he spat, his voice skipping her nickname and emphasising that second syllable, “you’ve said we were _business partners._ More than once.” 

“I know.” She was willing him to answer, still, that the things he would do for her would extend this far. 

“Sometimes I wondered.” His voice softened. She knew they were both thinking of that night in Sochi - the night she’d talked him off the wall and into her arms, sat in the freezing night cradling him until all of a sudden she was crying and he was cradling her, kissing her cheek as she told him how much he meant to her, how she’d lose so many reasons to be who she was without his fire, how she’d missed him when they’d been training in separate places. They’d kissed, that night, soft and deep. There had been something quiet and inevitable about it. And then, panting, their hands up each others’ shirts, Tessa had stepped back. Her eyes had said _we can’t_ and Scott had swallowed his hurt, holding her hand and swinging it cheerily all the way back to the athlete’s village. They’d still been quiet, hesitant then. After that it had seemed impossible to hide and their dances had become progressively more romantic. Their coaches called it growth and performance art. Tessa called it repression. 

“But in general….no. I thought maybe you felt...something physical, something circumstantial, nothing beyond.”

“That’s...fair,” she breathed. 

“But is it true!?” Suddenly he was almost angry. She’d come here, at night, to tell him what...that she’d been in love with him for years, in the most roundabout way possible? Now, when he’d resigned himself to _business partners_ and him and Jackie were fine, and good, and she seemed to have got past the _thing_ between him and Tessa - now, when he was finally going to get what he wanted and not wait for _her_ she had NEWS?

“No.” She watched Scott’s face harden and thought _crap._ Suddenly the words came out of her mouth without prompting. “Us skating together has been the most important thing in my life for fifteen years. I couldn’t risk it getting messed up by the feelings I thought you had - still hope you have - for me, and the feelings that I’ve always had for you. Scott, I’ve been in love with you since I was fifteen, but if we’d got together there’s no way we could have stopped it affecting our skating and so every time I felt them coming up I held it back and you’ll notice I never told you I didn’t feel anything but… I guess I always thought that when we retired, I’d have time to reconsider. To explain.” 

“Tess,” he watched her flushed face, soft-eyed. For a moment she was unbelievably hopeful, and then he seemed to remember himself. 

“You don’t want to retire. That’s why you’re saying this now.” His eyes were wilder than when they fudged a jump. He was looking for a way out - of the rink, of her face, of feelings he thought he’d got past but which were exploding in his chest anew. Tessa made wonder sing through him, but she was more than that. When he was lost, she was his harbour. When he wanted to roar and jump off cliffs and break rocks with frustration she pulled him into the circle of her arms and he remembered _cool_ and _calm_ and the brightness of her strength bouncing off the ice like a swarm of fireflies. Tessa made him more, and better, and so much of what he had always wanted to be. 

And when they were breathless at the end of a dance, skates trailing circles around each other on the ice, her shimmer-strong body bent over his knee with his lips to her neck, he wanted so much more from her. He wanted what millions of watching eyes wanted for them - lips and tongues but then picket fences also, their kids on his shoulders and her skates on his shoulders and Tessa’s arms wrapped around him. And apparently Kaitlyn had been right when she said that while she believed him and Tessa when they said there was nothing between them, she didn’t think they believed themselves. Because damn him if this feeling, now there was the possibility of it being reciprocated, wasn’t suddenly even stronger than it ever had been. 

“I mean yes of course but no! That’s not it at all!” Something within him was proud that he’d made Tessa struggle for words. She’d always been the carefully wordy one among them - able to weave answers to interview questions so well, couple them with a bashful smile so neatly, that you were convinced it was an actual answer and not an artful dodge. She was excellent at handling their media engagements, even when she felt the need to sink into him while she did so. He’d trail behind, hand on her back or her waist or her neck, offering the first words that came out of his mouth to match her patterns, and the world would see say they were in love all over again. 

“What then, Tessa?” 

“Scott, of course I don’t want to retire.” She’d taken a deep breath and put the spinning tops in her head back in order. If anyone deserved that, it was the man she loved but had been lying to for years. “I think we have a whole lot more to do. But this isn’t about that for me. This is about me going home and thinking about you at home with Jackie and realising that I can’t hold it down or suppress it anymore.” 

“It?” He demanded dryly. 

“That I’m in love with you, Scott! And I know I’ve been awful to not tell you for so long but I had to look after what we had! I couldn’t think of any other way. And then it hurt so much that I had to come here in the middle of the night and let you know before you get married and we retire and I die all over again!”

Why the hell was he in love with Tessa Virtue again? This was painful and all-consuming and “so you’re telling me NOW? Now, when you’ve kept it from me for years? Now, when I’m about to get engaged? Nobody deserves this, least of all Jackie! Tessa, I...I understand why you came, but I think you need to go.” 

He realised his mistake before she was even out the door. He imagined Jackie, asleep somewhere, dreaming with the light little smile she’d worn since they were tiny, and he felt sweetness, comfort, affection. He’d been a little upset when she couldn’t join his family for the holidays, but it was no big drama. There’d be another time. 

They said that to each other a lot. 

He’d seen it as endless capacity for love and growth together. Now he wondered if it wasn’t just lack of interest. 

Trying to compare Jackie to Tessa was a fool’s game, but he played it out anyway. Jackie was a sweetheart. His feelings for her were mellow, consistent. She’d met him at a time where he had it mostly together, and he felt bad burdening her with the awful parts. So he didn’t go to her when he had nightmares about jumping off that wall after all, of dropping Tessa, of ceasing to be loved and remembered. 

Tessa was...much. She was the other half of his soul. She knew him better than he knew himself. He’d felt fire and ice at her, but never wanted to leave her for a second. People around him said she gave him everything he was missing. They commented that he looked happier when he’d just seen her, that she’d helped him be more thoughtful, smarter, had brought out the calm in him. His mum said her little firecracker had found a safe place to set himself off. He went to her with his nightmares, every time - and every time she knew what to say, how to hold him, to make things okay. 

He liked Jackie plenty, but he didn’t love her. They’d get along well married - probably have a couple of kids, live out their lives in companionship - but she was owed someone who craved her touch, not someone who thought it was _fine._ He wondered how on earth he’d ever rationalised describing his potential future marriage as fine. 

* * *

Tessa was not fine.

She slammed her car door with greater force than it required, but she didn’t have anything else to break. She’d gone and told Scott what he meant to her in the middle of the night and he’d thrown her out. She knew she’d made her bed, but she hadn’t quite expected it to be made of nails. She loved him, darn it! She’d told him, and he’d seen what it cost her, and that apparently wasn’t enough? Was he kidding himself? 

And then she was in tears in her car, because she knew how unfair she’d been. She’d seen the torture on Scott’s face - her wonderful, honourable partner - trying to balance how he felt about her and how he felt about Jackie. Jackie deserved him to honour his commitments. He deserved to be allowed to, without his partner appearing from nowhere and declaring her undying love - half-faithful and half-terrified at the thought of losing him altogether, at having been too late. 

She sighed and turned the key in the ignition. She didn’t know if she wanted to drive back to her family now, but it seemed like the only thing to do. 

* * *

She got distracted on the way there. At the bottom of Scott’s street there was a park he’d told her about. He used to go there as a kid with his brother Danny (also an ice dancer who used to skate with one of their cousins) to chat and play and wrestle, and later to drink like the almost-rebel he was. She parked at the edge and sat on the swing, aware of her surroundings but tuned into the emptiness in her head. She imagined the pain would fade in time, but right now it wasn’t easy. 

She cried quietly in the half-light. 

* * *

He got in the car, swearing lightly. He wasn’t sure if chasing her was a reasonable response, but it felt unfair to let her sit with the belief that he still wanted her gone, wanted to marry Jackie. The soft tug of their partnership in his chest was present as always, but a little cold. He’d hurt her. He knew that. And a little part of him was afraid that she’d move on out of anger. What he’d said had been harsh, tense, and certainly not the response she was expecting. 

But when he imagined himself knocking on the door of her cousins’ house at 11pm, he stopped. Whether or not she’d done that to him two hours earlier - the kids barely in bed, the other adults playing cards in the kitchen - it didn’t seem appropriate to do back. 

He sighed. The only place he’d be able to think properly this time of night was the park. 

* * *

He saw her almost immediately. Back to him, outlined in the glow of a single streetlight, she looked like an angel. This was how he saw her on the ice - all clean lines and contemplation, no matter how hard her body was working. She’d always been the most graceful of athletes and of people. “Tessa,” he said softly, coming up behind her on barely padded feet. “I gave myself a second to think and realised something.” 

She turned around, startled. For a moment he saw the face he liked to think she reserved just for him - doe-eyed yet solid, confident yet trusting. Then she seemed to recall their last conversation, and it turned sharp-edged. “You told me to get out, Scott. What could you possibly have to say? And I’m warning you that i _will_ walk away if I can’t take this anymore.” 

She’d been crying. The tear tracks on her face had barely dried, and Scott hoped for his own sake as well as hers that he wouldn’t make her cry anymore. God knows he couldn’t take her tears without feeling that pain, and it would definitely distract from what he came to say. 

“I know, that’s your right.” He inclined his head, hair flopping into his face. “I love you, Tessa.” 

“I...know?” She’d half-known, but hadn’t been sure enough to express it before. “But you love Jackie too, and your commitment to her is important.” Her voice was too airy, like she was about to hyperventilate. 

“No, that’s what I mean, Tess. I’m _in love with you_ enough that it would be unbelievably unfair on me and you and Jackie to stay in that relationship.” 

“Scott..” She sighed. They’d always said their relationship was complex. Somehow whenever Scott’s girlfriends were around her it felt a little like a non-consensual threesome, no matter how hard she tried to break the ice. They’d sit in the corner watching her and Scott banter, watching his flirty protectiveness, watching the way she looked at him. She’d thought more than once that they shared her agony - that, to them too, Scott was just out of reach. 

Except that he was here now, and so was she. Maybe that would be enough for once? 

“ I….I was thinking about it, Scott murmured, “and you’re my other half, on and off the ice. I endlessly admire you, and you make me better. It’s...so much more than me and Jackie are.” His breath hitched. He felt like he was betraying his girlfriend, but nobody could deny the way he looked at Tessa. Now that it wasn’t off the table he’d never stop thinking about it - the way she laughed when he put his foot in his mouth and said he liked _doing it_ with his partner, that indulgent smile every time he called her a pretty girl, the way she’d lean into him, breathing hard, at the end of every programme. 

He pushed on before he lost his nerve. “I got _into_ this relationship running away from what I thought we could never become. And I still don’t agree with you hiding it from me for this long, and we’ll need to talk about that some more but _god,_ Tess, if you feel the way you say you do I think I need us to have forever, because that’s how long it’s going to take to have all the things I want to have with you.” 

“Are you….really?” She was plaintive, a small child. 

“Really.” He stepped up to her, grabbed a hand like he had so many times before, but a spark of something previously unrecognised jumped between them. “You’re the only person I want.” 

“You don’t want me to get out?” The sharpness was back, that twist of her tongue like grit in the wound. Good. If she was talking back it meant she wasn’t so scared anymore, and he was far more comfortable being scared of Tessa than having her scared. Lord knows he had plenty of practice. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, and the wind carried it away like the smell of musty leaves in the dull yellow light. “I don’t regret it, because I was thinking of Jackie and the way you’d kept this from me. We could have done it together, Tess, and then you wouldn’t be coming to me when I’d said I wanted to get engaged,” he laughed hopelessly, “and I wouldn’t be hurting someone I really care about.” 

He could see the apology traced in the lines of her eyes before she spoke. “I’m sorry too. I...I thought I knew better - decided I had to know better but I think, Scott...” She reached up to trace a hand down his cheek and he leaned into her touch, feeling the brush of slender fingers like butterfly’s wings. “I think I was scared of what I felt for you as much as I was worried about our careers. No matter what I did with it after Sochi, it only seemed to get stronger.” They’d done it again with that show in PyeongChang - a ploy to get everybody guessing, he’d say later, but really just testament to a relationship that was suppressed so much it sometimes simply took control. 

“Being scared of what I feel I can understand.” He hadn’t been able to understand how she felt after that night in Sochi - how she could kiss him like that and then act like nothing had changed. He hadn’t heard how she cried in her room last night, like her heart wanted out of her chest cavity. There was so much unspoken between them even as they spent most of their lives together - years of haphazard miscommunication and hurt stuffed into scarves and skates. “You really felt it, though...all that time?” 

“All that time. Every touch, every nearly-kiss, every interview we had to grin through was painful. I invented _business partners_ to hide behind.” 

“Oh you hid. I never wanted to find you behind that.” _I’ll always come get you, though, even when it’s the most painful thing I could do._ The words floated between them and dissipated, but they felt them more than if they had been said. 

“I’m sorry, Scott.” 

“I know. It’s not alright, but it will be.” And suddenly his hand was on her back, and their lips were nearly touching. It was him who pulled back this time. “I can’t.” 

“You can’t?” 

“Jackie...I...it’s a silly boundary for us anyway, it’s not like we haven’t done it before, but I think Jackie deserves a clean break.” 

“Of course she does,” she said, and he could see that admiration for his own sometimes-frustrating nobility. 

He seemed lost. “Come see me tomorrow?” she asked, and all of a sudden his face was smiling again. She could lose entire days in that smile - wild and warm and catching. And she’d never been prouder to put a smile on someone’s face. There was little more important to her than making Scott okay. 

He watched her get safely into her car before getting into his own. “I love you,” he whispered, and brushed his cheek where she had kissed it in goodbye. Things could be worse. 

* * *

He was sombre when he knocked this next morning. Things had gone down okay with Jackie, he said, except that she’d asked if Tessa was the reason. He hadn’t known what to say, and she’d read into the silence what was perfectly fair, but awfully cruel. 

“I’m grateful to have had you, Scott,” she had said softly in parting. “You always did love me in all the ways you could.” 

* * *

This was not first kiss territory. This was Tessa and Scott, finding an ice rink so Scott could skate out his fear of leaving good people behind, and Tessa could deal with her guilt about making him. 

Except that people recognised them (because of course people recognised them) and it became an impromptu show. Someone put on Stay and they were already moving, muscle memory pulling them into closer and closer proximity. It was a good outlet, at least, if tense. The applause at the end faded into the background as Tessa looked at Scott, and then she felt him bury his face in her neck in that classic way that had people thinking they _must_ be hooking up because if not, _what the hell was that?_ She just smiled into his shoulder in response. 

Maybe they were always meant to be. But now they _were._ And that was that. 

* * *

All bets were off when they left the rink. Scott left his arm around her as she called her agent - only she had a management company behind her, Scott preferring to direct business enquiries to an email address he had access to. She’d ribbed him about it endlessly, but now it meant one less person to be disappointed in their slightly unauthorised performance. Oops. But she couldn’t find it in herself to regret it, when it had become such a celebration of everything they meant to each other. 

She dropped her phone into her bag, and one-handed, he pulled her behind the stands. “Tess,” he said softly, and her eyes dropped to his lips. She nodded once, shy and silent. He brushed his thumb across her forehead, slipping a lock of hair behind her ear like he had on the ice so many times. Suddenly impatient, she leant in. 

Kissing Scott was like a perfectly deep edge, like a lift so neat that it felt like you were flying. His lips carried her like his arms always had and she felt herself swept up in the air, celebrated like the best of skaters - of people. But she knew that for her, the best of people was always Scott - the fire he trailed swiftly across her body, the explosive force that always held her up. 

His hands skimmed her back and she was coasting, tight spins and on-point twizzles. Her hand carded through his hair like the disbelief at the end of a dance. 

But when he moaned and pulled her closer, there was more and better. There was a tangle of legs on the sofa, popcorn and chaos and all-over wamth. There was Tessa, caught mid-step in a haze of white petals. There was his mum smiling as they skated in Ilderton, the way she had thanked them for accepting her as their own. There was forehead kisses and sunshine. There was...

“T, you are my home.” 

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
